capable of putting down poison.'

'Sidney's capable of anything,' said Midmore with immense feeling; but
once again he held his tongue. They were a queer community; yet when
they had stamped and jingled out to their horses again, the house felt
hugely big and disconcerting.

This may be reckoned the conscious beginning of his double life. It ran
in odd channels that summer--a riding school, for instance, near Hayes
Common and a shooting ground near Wormwood Scrubs. A man who has been
saddle-galled or shoulder-bruised for half the day is not at his London
best of evenings; and when the bills for his amusements come in he
curtails his expenses in other directions. So a cloud settled on
Midmore's name. His London world talked of a hardening of heart and a
tightening of purse-strings which signified disloyalty to the Cause. One
man, a confidant of the old expressive days, attacked him robustiously
and demanded account of his soul's progress. It was not furnished, for
Midmore was calculating how much it would cost to repave stables so
dilapidated that even the village idiot apologised for putting visitors'
horses into them. The man went away, and served up what he had heard of
the pig-pound episode as a little newspaper sketch, calculated to annoy.
Midmore read it with an eye as practical as a woman's, and since most of
his experiences had been among women, at once sought out a woman to whom
he might tell his sorrow at the disloyalty of his own familiar friend.
She was so sympathetic that he went on to confide how his bruised
heart--she knew all about it--had found so-lace, with a long O, in
another quarter which he indicated rather carefully in case it might be
betrayed to other loyal friends. As his hints pointed directly towards
facile Hampstead, and as his urgent business was the purchase of a horse
from a dealer, Beckenham way, he felt he had done good work. Later, when
his friend, the scribe, talked to him alluringly of 'secret gardens' and
those so-laces to which every man who follows the Wider Morality is
entitled, Midmore lent him a five-pound note which he had got back on
the price of a ninety-guinea bay gelding. So true it is, as he read in
one of the late Colonel Werf's books, that 'the young man of the present
day would sooner lie under an imputation against his morals than against
his knowledge of horse-flesh.'

Midmore desired more than he desired anything else at that moment to
ride and, above all, to jump